Demand for multimedia services has been growing around the world. Internet technology that has been developed on a worldwide basis plays a key role in addressing this demand. Protocols used within the Internet have key limitations in their ability to effectively manage the flow of data. These limitations result in less than ideal transmission of data over bearers that have less than ideal delay or error characteristics, and inefficient dissemination of data from a single entity to multiple end users.
Internet protocols were designed for use in high capacity wired networks. When these same protocols are used in wireless networks, either terrestrial or satellite, degradation of services often results from the interaction of the protocols and the delay or error characteristics of the media. While special solutions have been proposed for wireless links, means for mitigating the protocol related degradation over wireless links would allow the installed internet base to be accessible to wireless users with sufficient bandwidth.
In order to meet the demand for multimedia services on the Internet, it is necessary to distribute multimedia content to an unlimited number of users in response to their requests. Typically, Internet multimedia technology for audio and video uses socket connections between a broadcaster (server) and customers (clients). The socket establishes a single connection. Therefore, the broadcast server must generally handle each data stream for each customer separately. That may increase the load on the broadcast server and can easily overwhelm both the broadcast server as well as the Internet backbone.
One of the prior art solutions is that a client receiving a broadcast data stream will forward that data to the other clients. However, that requires the client to communicate with the other clients and hence leaves the system vulnerable to the reliable operation of the clients.
Therefore it is desirable to provide a method and device that can manage traffic efficiently for the provision of multimedia services.